National Instruments and Bosch Rexroth recently introduced a perfectly matched control and drive solution at this year's NIWeek conference. The advantages of the control hardware CompactRIO and the programming environment LabVIEW are combined with dynamic servo technology. Rexroth’s pre-configured drive systems for measuring and testing machines cover a wide range of services and shorten the initial commissioning to just three minutes by means of a software wizard. Using a jointly tested and proven interface, machinery manufacturers are programming motion sequences in the graphic environment LabVIEW without any PLC code.

National Instruments frequently uses the control hardware CompactRIO in these applications. Rexroth has preconfigured drive systems with the compact drive control devices IndraDrive Cs and the servo motors IndraDyn S. The IndraDrive Cs kits cover the torque range from 0.56 Nm to 19.8 Nm in finely scalable increments. In addition, Rexroth supports custom drive solutions for torques up to 631 Nm. 

Using the interface CAN over EtherCat, the CompactRIO control directly accesses the servo drives as master. Manufacturers can program processes and motion control via the graphical programming environment LabVIEW exclusively, making any additional PLC programming redundant. The plugin SoftMotion Drive Interface (SDI) required for IndraDrive Cs can be downloaded and installed directly from the LabVIEW development environment.

The start-up assistant EasyWizard shortens the initial start-up of the drive systems to just three minutes. The intelligent drive control device automatically recognizes the respective values via the electronic nameplate of the Rexroth motors. For the initial start-up of IndraDrive Cs drives the user only needs to enter a small number of application-specific values. Graphical programming of movements can then start right away in LabVIEW.

The IndraDyn S synchronous servo motors can meet the requirements of protection class IP54 or IP65. Depending on the precision required, the motors are equipped with encoder systems for standard or precision requirements.

CompactRIO is particularly suitable for point-to-point movements in applications with a small number of axes. Bosch Rexroth simplifies the implementation of complex multi-axis applications with measuring and testing machines in LabVIEW using the Motion-Logic-System, IndraMotion MLC. Programming of movements can also take place exclusively via LabVIEW without a single line of PLC code. For IndraMotion MLC, more than 550 virtual tools and modules are already available for movement control in LabVIEW.